The Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard provides a universal interface for a Personal Computer (PC) that includes universal plug-and-play and relative ease-of-use. Specifically, when a USB peripheral device is plugged-in to a USB port on a PC, the system will auto-detect and auto-configure the peripheral device. The USB peripheral devices may include devices such as printers, scanners, keyboards, a mouse, joysticks, digital cameras, digital video cameras, data acquisition devices, modems, speakers, telephones or video phones, storage devices such as ZIP drives, or any other peripheral or computing device.
In most cases, there is zero user intervention. The USB interface also eliminates the need for multiple input/output (I/O) standards to peripheral devices, thereby simplifying PC connectivity for the consumer as well as simplifying manufacturing for the PC Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).
The original USB specification has evolved over time to meet the needs of industry, resulting in three versions available today. The first two versions, USB 1.0 (later revised to USB 1.1) and USB 2.0, respectively, are wired interfaces, as they use a cable between a host (for example a personal computer or PC) and the USB peripheral device. Although the USB 1.1 has a top transmission speed of 12 million bits/second (Mb/s), system performance may become sluggish if multiple multimedia devices are attached to one USB 1.1 port. USB 2.0 transmission speed is increased to 480 mega bits/second but maintains backwards compatibility to the full speed (12 Mb/s) and low speed (1.5 Mb/s) devices defined in the USB 1.1 specification. USB 3.0 has transmission speeds of up to 5 gigabits/second and has downward compatibility to USB 2.0 devices.
Although USB 3.0 provides many improvements over previous USB versions, facets of its implementation may not be explicitly defined and may be improved and/or extended. For example, at present, there is no specification-compliant method in existence to perform re-enumeration.